Critic Reviews

• Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

  Godard has created such a hermetic, uncompromising world that only the hardiest cinematic spelunkers are likely to appreciate its depths.

• Desson Thomson, Washington Post

  It's the intellectual ride of your life, as far as moviegoing goes.

• Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail

  A haunting, intense work, intellectually exploratory yet too emotionally acute in its melancholy to be considered merely academic.

• Gene Seymour, Newsday

  The movie's ripe, enrapturing beauty will tempt those willing to probe its inscrutable mysteries.

• Marta Barber, Miami Herald

  The best indication of the film's pretentiousness comes from recurrent images of a book with blank pages, as if to point out that Godard has nothing to say, but so what? Let's throw in a few images and people will come anyway.

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

  The trick when watching Godard is to catch the pitch of his poetics, savor the pleasure of his sounds and images, and ponder the historical, philosophical, and ethical issues that intersect with them.

• Michael Dequina, TheMovieReport.com

  All the beauty does not make the film even half as profound as it so obviously strives to be.

• Derek Smith, Cinematic Reflections

  Love, in Godard's case, is indistinguishable from cinema and thus he sees the growing capitalist machine as a threat to both.

• Jake Euker, F5 (Wichita, KS)

  Free-associative, unreasonable and stubborn, unresolved, and elegiac in tone, In Praise of Love is a great meditation on memory, aging, and love.

• Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews

  What keeps me coming back to a filmmaker I never warmed up to, is that I find the rascal irresistible.

• Gabe Leibowitz, Film and Felt

  Ultimately, though, In Praise of Love is about themes, about the anti-Hollywood sentiment that Godard feels so passionately about, and this is where the film begins to crumble.

• Rich Cline, Film Threat

  It's intriguing, visually arresting and utterly impenetrable!

• John Beifuss, Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)

  When a character comments 'too many changes are in the air that lack a means of expression,' one senses that Godard, at 72, is still struggling to communicate those changes through the medium of film.

• Chris Hewitt (St. Paul), St. Paul Pioneer Press

  An unsuccessful attempt at a movie of ideas.

• Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle

  The 70-year-old Godard has become, to judge from In Praise of Love, the sort of bitter old crank who sits behind his light meter and harangues the supposed injustices of the artistic world-at-large without doing all that much to correct them.

• Frank Ochieng, Movie Eye

  Gone are the days of an exciting existentialist movie mastermind who once knew how to stroke the consciousness of the enthusiastically challenged, adventurous moviegoer.

• Saul Austerlitz, Film Threat

  Gives the impression of a man who has lost his will to make movies, and even to go on living, a sentiment difficult to empathize with without likewise giving up on life.

• Laura Kelly, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

  Godard's utterly nonlinear drama explores history and memory, old age and youth, love and art, action and reaction, life and existence, and possibly even more ideas than I was unable to mine in one exhaustive viewing.

• Jeff Vice, Deseret News, Salt Lake City

  A ponderous meditation on love that feels significantly longer than its relatively scant 97 minutes.

• Shawn Levy, Oregonian

  Like most of Godard's films, In Praise of Love makes you stay awake and lean forward.

Read all 21 critic reviews